10 Terrifying Horror Films That Haunted Your 2015

5. Bone Tomahawk

Set in the old West, writer/director S. Craig Zahler€™s Bone Tomahawk has been described as The Searchers meets Cannibal Holocaust. Partly, that€™s because lazy critical comparisons do actually work (if you€™re familiar with either film, you now have a working model in your head of how Bone Tomahawk works as a piece of cinema), and partly that€™s because that€™s exactly what the film is: it€™s the cowboys-rescue-damsel-from-indians chassis of the former bolted onto the stripped-down horror movie engine of the latter. But just because the pitch for this flick could have been written by an app doesn€™t write off the core of the movie. The men who set off to rescue settlement medic Samantha O€™Dwyer could have been four stock characters, but the film€™s idiosyncratic ear for grimly witty dialogue and eye for perfect character casting make the slow burning start compulsive viewing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZbwtHi-KSE The sheriff is, by now, the kind of role that Kurt Russell could play in his sleep, so it€™s to his eternal credit that he throws so much into it, proving himself one of the greatest character leads of his generation yet again. Richard Jenkins is marvellously catty as the elderly deputy who€™s far too old for all of this, while Matthew Fox€™s cynical, dandyish, bullsh*t artist is a perfect foil for the pair of them and Patrick Wilson€™s unreasonably courageous cowboy, the husband of the kidnapped woman (who spends the majority of the film€™s two-plus hours struggling to catch up to everyone else, alone, with a broken leg) becomes the unlikely hero. It€™s the final forty-five minutes or so where Bone Tomahawk goes from arid, uneasily compelling western to harrowing survival horror. These are not the €˜Red Indians€™ of your cinemagoing childhood: in fact, the film makes it as plain as possible that these appallingly savage cave-dwelling cannibals are a dying breed rendered barely human, by having a Native American deliver that contemptuous condemnation. Unlike this tribe of painted demons, Zahler€™s sparse, mordantly funny and bleakly violent western takes no prisoners. Relentless and gutchurningly horrible when it gets going, you€™ll have this one living in the back of your head for days.